#queer intimacy

I want to follow up on some points I made in my last post about attraction, specifically how I don’t really experience differences in attraction.  While a lot of discussion about aromantic identity and experience centers attraction, my personal experience doesn’t match this.  I can’t separate my experience of attraction into categories like platonic, aesthetic, and sensual.  I’m either attracted to someone, or I’m not, and the difference in that feeling of attraction itself between different people is minimal, even though the relationships themselves are drastically different.  More importantly, attraction isn’t a key factor in whether or not I choose to be intimate with someone.

For me, being aro is not about defining the nature of attraction, it’s about decentering attraction in relation to intimacy.

For me, intimacy is all about mutual expressions of love, so who I’m being intimate with, and why, and what exactly I feel about them is a core part of the experience of intimacy with them.  The primary factors in my intimate decisions are trust, a history of emotional closeness, vulnerability, nurture, empathy, and what I think will work well in that particular relationship.  Attraction is either a minor factor or not a factor at all, even though I do experience attraction, sometimes quite strongly.  Attraction is just unimportant to me when it comes to making choices about intimacy and relationships.

So while it’s true that I don’t experience romantic attraction, that’s not what matters to me about being aromantic.  What’s important to me is that my experience of intimacy is fundamentally different from how alloromantics experience intimacy, as I mentioned in my last post.  All my different kinds of personal relationships are different from the kinds of personal relationships alloromantics form.  All the normative models of personal relationships, friendship, family, and intimate relationships, fail to be applicable to my experience just as much as the models of romance fail to be applicable to my experience.

Because of this, I reject the idea that being aromantic is a lack of something that alloromantics experience.  My experience of attraction and intimacy isn’t a lack of anything, it’s a fundamental difference in form and structure that extends to all kinds of relationships and intimacy, as I said in my last post.  It’s also misleading to questioning arospec people who do experience some form of romantic attraction to define aromanticism as a lack of romantic attraction.

A good example is that I see a lot of aro people complain about how hard it is to find friends who prioritize friendship, or intimacy in friendships, or are willing to make commitments in friendships, and I also have this problem.  If anything, a lot of aros experience friendship more richly and more intensely than allos.  I think this is an example of how aromantic experience is fundamentally different in ways that can’t be explained by simply an absence of romantic attraction.  I’m sure some individuals experience being aromantic as primarily just a lack of romantic attraction, but I think defining aromanticism at its core as an absence of a particular kind of attraction is a disservice to a lot of aros.